Hello,
Most fonts are missing some characters (S and T with a comma below, as opposed to those with a cedilla; see [1] for a discussion) needed to correctly represent some letters in the Romanian alphabet. Initially, Windows XP did not include support for these characters, but it released an update to fix this once Romania joined the EU. The update [2] contains the fonts Times New Roman, Arial, Trebuchet, Verdana.
Winetricks should include a new trick to download this update and install the 16 font files from the package. It would be nice to have something like "corefonts w/ EU update" which would install the fixed fonts + the other core fonts that are not included in this update. There is a small problem caused by the casing of the filenames in this update (Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana filenames have a different casing than the ones on SF.net), so they should be renamed to match the original corefonts names. Also, corefonts should not override the updated EU fonts if it detects them.
There is the general problem that most system fonts wine uses are missing these characters, and some characters render incorrectly in dialogs. Most notably, the find/replace dialogs in comdlg32 with ro_RO.utf8 locale are completely broken font-wise: ă and î look bad, ț shows as a question mark. "MS Shell Dlg" font is usually used in dialogs, but it doesn't show up in the font selection dialog, so I'm not sure what font is actually used.
Try pasting the following text in notepad/wordpad and try various fonts to see for yourself:
ă Ă - a with breve
â Â - a with circumflex
î Î - i with circumflex
ș Ș - s with comma
ț Ț - t with comma
ş Ş - s with cedilla (obsolete for RO)
ţ Ţ - t with cedilla (obsolete for RO)
Not sure how this issue could be fixed. Are the fonts we currently use open source, can we edit them?
Octavian